After the first disappointment, strange to say, Bennington became quite
resigned. He had felt, a little illogically, that this giving of a
whole day to the picnic was not quite the thing. His Puritan conscience
impressed him with the sacredness of work. He settled down to the fact
of the rainstorm with a pleasant recognition of its inevitability, and
a resolve to improve his time.
To that end, after breakfast, he drew on a pair of fleece-lined
slippers, donned a sweater, occupied two chairs in the well-known
fashion, and attacked with energy the pages of Le Conte's Geology.
This book, as you very well know, discourses at first with great
interest concerning erosions. Among other things it convinces you that
a current of water, being doubled in swiftness, can transport a mass
sixty-four times as heavy as when it ran half as fast. This astounding
proposition is abstrusely proved. As Bennington had resolved not to
make his reading mere recreation, he drew diagrams conscientiously
until he understood it. Then he passed on to an earnest consideration
of why the revolution of the globe and the resistance of continents
cause oceanic currents of a particular direction and velocity. Besides
this, there was much easier reading concerning alluvial deposits. So
interested did he grow that Old Mizzou, coming in, muddy-hoofed and
glistening from a round of the stock, found him quite unapproachable on
the subject of cribbage. The patriarch then stumped over to Arthur's
cabin.
After dinner, Bennington picked up the book again, but found that his
brain had reached the limit of spontaneous mental effort. He looked for
Old Mizzou and the cribbage game. The miner had gone to visit Arthur
again. Bennington wandered about disconsolately.
For a time he drummed idly on the window pane. Then he took out his
revolver and tried to practise through the open doorway. The smoke from
the discharges hung heavy in the damp air, filling the room in a most
disagreeable fashion. Bennington's trips to see the effect of his shots
proved to him the fiendish propensity of everything he touched, were it
never so lightly, to sprinkle him with cold water. Above all, his skill
with the weapon was not great enough as yet to make it much fun. He
abandoned pistol shooting and yawned extensively, wishing it were time
to go to bed.
In the evening he played cribbage with Old Mizzou. After a time Arthur
and his wife came in and they had a dreary game of "cinch," the man
speaking but little, the woman not at all. Old Mizzou smoked
incessantly on a corncob pipe charged with a peculiarly pungent variety
of tobacco, which filled the air with a blue vapour, and penetrated
unpleasantly into Bennington's mucous membranes.
The next morning it was still raining.
Bennington became very impatient indeed, but he tackled Le Conte
industriously, and did well enough until he tried to get it into his
head why various things happen to glaciers. Then viscosity, the lines
of swiftest motion, relegation, and directions of pressure came forth
from the printed pages and mocked him. He arose in his might and went
forth into the open air.